Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
We went to the Information Management Resource Steering Committee, briefed the division
engineers, and finally I went with General Hatch in the middle of the steering committee
wrap-up to see Mr. Page and laid it out for him and received his approval. [See Appendix D.]
We had met his requirements. We had shown him, by this process, that requirements had
driven our recommended system. We had taken those requirements and built the automation
program for the Corps for 1995 that was needed, and we were going to accommodate project
management--something new. We were going to do the work of the Corps in all the other
areas. Also, the essential initial programs had to be, as a minimum, provided by '92; others
could be judged on their own economic feasibility.
We showed him that the economic analysis showed we would save money in automation
alone and we would increase productivity. That is, we could combine finance and accounting
centers and do away with some positions. We would eliminate people doing stubby pencil
jobs today and save other money in the future.
We talked affordability. We showed him, if I remember the number, 4,000 a year per
district would be saved in automation billbacks.
I told him that we needed to provide discipline in the system. We had to right some of that.
We convinced him that--when I talk about the Information Management technocrat, I'm not
really disparaging him, but he wasn't in charge--the leaders were in charge. I mean, the
corporate management was now telling Page we wanted to do this because we had addressed
our requirements in each of the functional areas. We'd integrated them and had them in a
logical solution.
So, it was not the technicians bringing that solution to Page. It was Corps leaders, who now
understood the corporation and how automation could help them, who had come to that
decision. That was our recommendation.
He then approved it and wrote letters to the Office of Management and Budget, the
congressional committees, and back to the Chief and said he was removing his office as the
obstacle that he'd put himself in and now wanted the normal routine approval, budgeting,
programming process to work.
So, with that, we have now given the second option year to Control Data, and we're figuring
out what we want to buy with that. We will buy the communications equipment to provide
every one of our field offices. We're paying for the redeployment of the hardware that was at
our pilot site locations to our regional centers. We have to buy very little additional
mainframe hardware--some--and we spend our effort really developing the software things
that make it work.
So, that was the year of automation.
Q:
It started out as what you thought was going to be a one-vendor selection. About how much
of your total time do you think you might have given to that, if that's possible to estimate?
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